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Tara Maya’s previously published short stories, most of them no longer available in print, are gathered together here for the first time. A number of the tales are short shorts or flash fiction, including the poignant, "Ghosts on Red Strings, " and the biting alternate history, "Best of All Possible Worlds. " Longer stories and two novelettes round out the collection. The emotional timbre ranges across a wide gamut. "Tomorrow We Dance" is a bleak retelling of the fairy-tales Pied Piper and the Emperor's New Clothes. In the more heroic and romantic Painted World stories (two are here), artists are able to bring their paintings to life. For fans of hard sf, there is "A Thousand Blossoms With The Day," which starts from the premise there might have been life in the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang. An Author's Note, and author Comments on the story behind each story, enliven the volume with the author’s own strange journey from homeless street person to published author.

"Ghosts on Red Strings" - Only through forgiveness can she free her ghosts.... But some crimes cannot be forgiven.

"Conmergence" - In a non-Euclidean multiverse, parallel universes can meet.

"Portrait of a Pretender" - A murdered king, an heir in danger and a usurper... but is he as black as they paint? (a Painted World story)

"Refractions from the Neglected Side" - A brain damaged woman suffers from hemi-neglect, the inability to see anything on the left. The cure may be even more bizarre.

"Burn" - In that kingdom, witches burned. (8 of Swords of Tarot Tales)

"The Best of All Possible Worlds" - Money can buy anything, even a universe where you can be happy. Right?

"Public Eye" - To hide from the grid, you have to give up everything. Especially friends.

"Walker" - And yet there are those the grid refuses to see.

"A Thousand Blossoms With The Day" - The universe is less than a second old, and already life struggles to survive.

"You Have Not Forgotten How To Fly" - A faery once defeated an evil war lord, but can she handle a toddler?

"Delivery Status, Failure" - Note to self: don't try to call mom and work on the computer at the same time.

"Grace" - God promised her a great destiny. God lied.

"Tomorrow We Dance" - When the Bone Whistler plays his flute, the whole tribe dances and a new day is just over the horizon...

"The Virgin's Choice" - A princess tests her three suitors and discovers something surprising. (4 of Cups in Tarot Tales)

"Drawn to the Brink" - Her job is to hunt a monster escaped from a painting. She didn't expect him to be so handsome... or to need his help.

"Babel-17" by Samuel R. DelanyRavaged by two decades of savage war, Rydra Wong is called in by the military to decipher the strange radio sounds before and after each enemy attack. To save humanity, she must make sense of this gibberish, but the more she understands the more she is enticed to join the enemy. Will she? Learn more | See related books

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Tara Maya has lived in a village in Africa, meditated in a nunnery in Nepal, volunteered at an Gandhian ashram in India, toured dungeons in Transylvania, explored the rooftops of stone cities in Yemen and worked with human rights groups in Indonesia. She holds a degree in History, because a degree in Time Travel was not available.

More About the Author

Tara Maya has lived in Africa, Europe and Asia. She's pounded sorghum with mortar and pestle in a little clay village where the jungle meets the desert, meditated in a Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas and sailed the Volga river to a secret city that was once the heart of the Soviet space program. This first-hand experience, as well as research into the strange and piquant histories of lost civilizations, inspires her writing. Her terrible housekeeping, however, is entirely the fault of pixies.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

"A Thousand Blossoms With The Day" is one of the best short stories I've ever read, I will recommend it to any one that will listen to me. To the ones that don't listen to me, I shall even reverse recommend it!

Tara Maya is definitely a talented writer and that was clear from the first story in this anthology. I was moved immediately by "Ghosts on Red Strings." It was very timely, considering the ethnic violence still taking place around the world today. The "Painted World" and "Tarot" stories deserve books of their own. A couple of stories were fragments, which sometimes was frustrating, but mostly because i wanted to read more. I hope that a good publisher discovers this collection and offers Tara a book deal.

When she says "speculative" fiction, Tara really means it. She has some very interesting and thought-provoking speculations on future (and past and fictional) tech and society in this anthology. The fun thing is that she explains how she developed the stories in the notes after each story. That's very helpful for aspiring writers such as myself.

While my favorite stories are very short, Ghosts on Red Strings and The Best of All Possible Worlds, I would love to see some of the worlds she creates expanded into full length novels.

This anthology is great for filling the little reading gaps you might have during your day. Buy it! Read it! Review it!

(When you review a book, it really helps out the author reach more readers. So, especially if you like a book, be sure to come back and review it!)

It's a bit of understatement to say that this collection is uneven. You will find here several very short sketches, some in fantasy and some in SciFi genre, the later better than the former. Fantasy lovers will probably enjoy two longer stories set in "The Painted World", competently written but rather uninspired chapters from a novel yet to be written, with familiar motifs of magical imagery turning into reality and even more familiar court intrigues (some interesting plot surprises do occur, though).

"Refractions from the Neglected Side" is the best SciFi offering here: reminiscent of early Greg Egan, this story wonders what would the world look like if we were truly able to pay attention.

But the sufficient reason to buy this collection is "Tomorrow We dance". At the surface a retelling of "The Pied Piper" tale with some "The Emperor's New Clothes" and "Lord of the Flies" thrown in, this powerful novelette is much more than that: it convincingly tells how we fall for false prophets, how we abandon our humanity for empty promises, and why nobody is free of danger of becoming a beast to others, even the closest ones, in the name of great common good at the other side of the rainbow.

The author tells us in her comments she is working on the novel from which this little masterpiece was taken. Not a great fan of fantasy myself, I eagerly await it nevertheless. It might easily make hardships of life on the streets worthwhile (read those comments to see what I am talking about (o: )

Conmergence presents a solid batch of stories that are crafted to a high standard. Tara Maya's prose is quite fine, and I quickly settled in to enjoy some well-written tales. They range from 2-page "flash" pieces to longer stories that verge on being novellas. The longer pieces were my favorites, possibly because they were more character-based. A couple of the shorter pieces were clearly more idea-based and that's not really my thing, but "Tomorrow We Dance," the penultimate story in the collection, is really really cool.

One of the things I'm impressed with in Tara Maya's writing is the way she creates new terms. Most of her stories take place in fictional worlds, and her characters are using fictional objects to do fictional activities. A lot of SF breaks down at the prose level when the author is confronted with the task of naming imaginary items and actions. Tara Maya has come up with a lot of believable new words, which fit into the sounds of English pretty well. Her new words are either Latinate or Anglo-Saxon, or at least have the sounds of Latinate or Anglo-Saxon words. It was wonderful to come across these invented words and the author's work here deepens the reading experience. Again I say that it's wonderfully cool and I'm really impressed. "Delighted" is probably the word I'm looking for here. I'm a big fan of detailed craftsmanship.

Anyway, I don't really review books but Conmergence has been out for a while and I've been remiss about saying anything about it. It is a very good book. I don't mean, "good for SF." I mean it's plain old good writing. I don't know why Ms Maya doesn't have a publishing contract already. I don't know why her books aren't on the shelves at your local book store. I really don't. Because she can really write.

I love Tara Maya. She's a fantastic author and I love that she takes the time to write thoroughly stories rather then rush through a story just to get it out. Sure, it means there are great lengths of time between releases but that's ok; I'd rather have that then have an incomplete or inaccurate story.

While I didn't necessarily personally like all the short stories in this anthology, there were a number that I thought were fantastic. I love getting to know Tara Maya as an author better and the back story to her life. I think her idea of a short story series based off of the Tarot cards is a great idea because I loved the twists on the two stories included in this anthology.